Scan barcode
A review by justabean_reads
The Winter Knight by Jes Battis
Did not finish book. Stopped at 22%.
I'd actually been excited about this one even before the Canada Reads list, as it was getting a lot of buzz last fall, and I'm now Into King Arthur Stuff, but meh. I maybe just wasn't in the mood for it. Or maybe I never would've been in the mood for it; I tend to find stories that take characters from a historical setting and put them in modern day something of a hard sell.
The set up is that all of the knights and royalty from myth are constantly reincarnated and live out versions of their stories over and over again, and are currently all at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. For reasons that were not entirely clear to me, a matrilineal family of Valkyries polices the reincarnated knights. There's also three fates, kelpies and a bunch of other mythological people and critters. The blurb implied I was going to find out why they were all in Vancouver, and what the Indigenous opinions on these shenanigans were, but I just wasn't invested in anyone, and found the worldbuilding a bit precious.
I usually read the author's notes and acknowledgements first, even if they're in the back, but for whatever reason I only looked at them after I'd decided to bail this time. Good choice, as Battis concludes with, "I hope this story leads you to all the queer possibilities in medieval literature." Then why was it set in modern times!?
The set up is that all of the knights and royalty from myth are constantly reincarnated and live out versions of their stories over and over again, and are currently all at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. For reasons that were not entirely clear to me, a matrilineal family of Valkyries polices the reincarnated knights. There's also three fates, kelpies and a bunch of other mythological people and critters. The blurb implied I was going to find out why they were all in Vancouver, and what the Indigenous opinions on these shenanigans were, but I just wasn't invested in anyone, and found the worldbuilding a bit precious.
I usually read the author's notes and acknowledgements first, even if they're in the back, but for whatever reason I only looked at them after I'd decided to bail this time. Good choice, as Battis concludes with, "I hope this story leads you to all the queer possibilities in medieval literature." Then why was it set in modern times!?